In telecommunications, forward error correction (FEC) is a system of data transmission error control, whereby the sender adds redundant data to the original user data that allows the receiver to detect transmission errors. An FEC system may correct the transmission errors within certain limits without asking the sender to retransmit the data. This advantage is achieved at the cost of higher bandwidth requirements for data transmission, and therefore FEC is generally only applied in situations where retransmissions are undesirable, relatively costly, or impossible.
It is a relatively recent development that 10 Gigabit (10 G) Ethernet technology is used in the passive optical network (PON) deployment, known as EPON. EPON takes advantage of the widely deployed Internet Protocol (IP) network and the maturity of the 10 G optical network technology. To improve the transmission quality and to meet the service quality demand for the “last-mile” customers, there is a need for an efficient FEC system that takes into consideration the network and traffic characteristics of 10 G EPON.